Women must not wear pants even when they are home alone, Rabbi Shlomi Aviner has ruled.

Aviner, Beit El's rabbi and one of Religious Zionism's most prominent leaders, was asked in a cellular Q&A session published in the "Small World" bulletin, "When a girl goes to relieve herself at night, is she allowed to say the 'Asher Yatzar' ('he who formed') prayer while wearing a short-sleeved shirt and trousers?"

Opinion

Wrong kind of modesty / Uri Orbach

Growing modesty requirements in religious world have nothing to do with religious law

The rabbi replied that it is permitted to say the prayer in such a case, but added that "in general, a woman must always wear modest clothes even when she is alone and in the dark, because the Holy one blessed be he is everywhere. And yes, trousers are a self-prohibition even when a woman is alone."

Meanwhile, Rabbi Israel Rosen, head of the Tsomet Institute, has claimed an article published in synagogues over the weekend that "too much modesty leads women to the opposite direction, from abstinence to immorality."

According to the rabbi, this is "an axiom which applies to people who have experienced leaps forward and sharp transitions in their religious conduct throughout their lives."

Rabbi Rosen also slammed the haredi norm to omit names of women from newspapers and from invitations, comparing it to the veil phenomenon in Muslim countries.

"For so-called modesty reasons, the woman is only presented as 'his wife', nameless, veiled, and my heart twitches," he wrote in a weekly column published in synagogues over the weekend. "Is there no psychological connection between the hypocrisy of concealing the name and hiding the face under the 'Taliban-style' veil?"